


Gallifreyan Silver Trees

by 12thofNever



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Male Slash, Platonic Cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 08:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4953367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/12thofNever/pseuds/12thofNever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story takes place on the same small pastoral planetoid as Birthsong and Infinity for a Moment. The Time Lords have finally granted the Third Doctor back his memories and knowledge of the TARDIS, allowing him to travel in space and time once more. His first solo trip is to an idyllic place from his previous life. But he discovers he is not alone there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gallifreyan Silver Trees

**Author's Note:**

> This occurs shortly after the events of "The Three Doctors". The Time Lords have restored Three's memory and the secrets of the TARDIS. The sudden influx of these returning memories and emotions are threatening to overwhelm him.  
> LOTS of angst. (You have been warned.)  
> Also: The Clangers.

   "Look at you," said his enemy. "Just look how beautiful you've become."  
    He reached up, gesturing at  the Doctor's froth of white hair. "Tall and elegant as a Gallifreyan silver tree."  The Master then managed a smile that was somehow both coy as well as vindictive. "And just like a tree, unmovable."  
    The Doctor's eyes were polar in their rage. "How dare you come here. How dare you," he said with a barely controlled growl.  
    The Master shrugged, unconcerned by his enemy's gathering fury. He glanced casually about himself, his languid eyes taking in the meadows, the blossoming trees, the distant craggy cliffs that overlooked a sea as violet as the sky above it.  
    "Very pretty," he mused. "It must be incredibly rich in natural resources. I wonder how I might be able to exploit it."  
   He thought then that the otherwise statue-still Doctor would actually hit him. He saw the tall man's thin mouth curl and reshape itself into a snarl, those patrician nostrils flaring in quite an amusing way. But instead of striking him, the Doctor fixed him with a basilisk-glare. He hissed from between clenched teeth:  
    "I will ... never... let that happen."  
    The Master chuckled. "You really are quite fond of this place, aren't you? It must hold some sort of special memory for you then? Something you lost in one of your past lives?" He cast a furtive sideways glance at the Doctor's sharp profile, at his aquiline nose and stubborn chin.  
    "Or... someone?"  
    It was only then that he saw the Doctor flinch. It was an unguarded moment and to his own surprise, the Master did not enjoy seeing it.  All at once, there was badly concealed anguish there in his enemy's face and this puzzled him. Was there perhaps grief over one of his human pets?  
    Well, he decided, this was something he should exploit instead of this little pastoral planetoid. Predictably, the Doctor could be counted on for having fallen disastrously in love once again and the Master could use this to his own advantage. How many more of these primitive creatures would his old classmate and lover go through before he realized the two species were incompatible?  
  
    The Doctor's memories had started to return when the Time Lords had pardoned him and once more given him back the secrets of the TARDIS. Before the confrontation with Omega, all of his knowledge of his time machine and even his own past had been swathed in fog. He sometimes would drive himself into a panic with the need to remember incidents, names, calculations, faces. So many faces.  
     He had shared his consciousness with the sentient TARDIS he had stolen from Gallifrey and upon his capture, the Time Lords had cruelly severed that link as punishment. He had then been marooned on Earth as part of his sentence and his poor filched ship had become merely a husk of itself. Without its pilot's memories, it became like so much space junk to take apart and put back together. Why had they tortured him so by leaving the TARDIS with him in his exile? Yes, this TARDIS model was considered obsolete now by his own people, and perhaps that's how the Time Lords viewed the both of them: rubbish to be thrown away. Thus he and his old ship were hurled down onto the primitive planet that the Time Lord Council knew he was most fond of, and both he and his ship were stripped of the telepathy necessary for their partnership.  One of them was a broken TARDIS; the other a broken Time Lord.  
    On Earth, he had been unable to re-establish his mental connection with his Old Girl.  Not for lack of trying, however. Desperate in his tinkering with the time rotor, he had even wound up in a parallel universe by mistake, and it had nearly been the end of him.  
    Knowledge and memories continued to allude him, right up until a strange flute-like instrument mysteriously materialized onto the ship's console one day. And then a ghost from the past quickly followed along to fetch it.  
    Himself.  
  
    He had become re-acquainted with his two past lives in that bizarre adventure in which all three of his incarnations became pawns of the Time Lords in order to defeat another mad being of his own race called Omega. The Time Lords were pleased with how he and his past selves had worked together to save Gallifrey and as a reward, they allowed his Third and present incarnation to travel in space and time freely again. They also re-established his  connection to the TARDIS. When all the missing pieces of his lost memories flowed back into his consciousness, when he felt his old traveling companion psychically greet him once more, he broke down and wept for sheer joy.  
    He was only thankful that the Brigadier--or, for that matter, faithful and sympathetic Jo Grant-- could not see him on his knees clinging to the TARDIS console in relieved gratitude, all the while sobbing like a child. Telepathically, the TARDIS told him not to be so melodramatic and also that he was getting her circuits soaked with Time Lord tears.  
    "We're going on a vacation," he told her, "just you and I."  
  
    He began to remember where each hidden room was in the labyrinthine ship and even all the things he kept in them. (Did he really need a room that was just full of butterflies? Oh, that was his ridiculous Second self again.) He then started remembering coordinates, the time corridors, the shortcuts and wormholes, the stars' names. And then he began to remember other, more intimate things.  
    All this had really started when he'd angrily confronted his previous self, long before the Time Lords formally restored his memory. Meeting himself had opened up a psychic link to his past. However, his first response to this had been indignation. He found his last incarnation infinitely annoying and to share anything with this scarecrow-leprechaun was beyond his tolerance; in fact, it was outrageous. And the little fellow returned his intense dislike in kind.  
   He had pulled himself up to his full, towering height before this small comical version of himself, the man he still could not believe he had been. He saw all the mistakes he never wanted to repeat, personified before him as a little dark man in a frock coat playing insipid tunes on a recorder.  
    This was no longer him. This was no one he ever wanted to be again. Yet, his past self eyed his future up and down with a great deal of amusement. "So I'm to become a pompous, vain fancy-pants? Oh, bother. How insufferable the future will be."  
    But how strange it had been when he looked down into those lugubrious blue eyes that had used to be his own and he had felt a sudden tragic loss of... something.  
    Someone.  
    And the quest to find out the source of this forgotten tragedy led him here, to this small, lush planet that seemed to retain its gentle, wild innocence, which reminded him of his past self. There was a memory here, somewhere, that he needed to retrieve.  
     He found he was not alone in coming here, however. Someone else had been curious about his sudden flight from Earth and had followed him in secret. A snake had slithered into the garden with him.  
  
    The Master smiled up at him, his dark eyes twinkling with sly mirth. The Doctor noted that he had kept a similar appearance from their long-ago lives together on Gallifrey: still dark, still bearded, with sleek high cheekbones and fathomless dusky eyes. He seemed a bit more compact than he remembered... or was that just because his new form was so tall? The Master and his previous self could have easily glared at one another from the same eye level.  
    Now the Master's black hair and beard were shot through with streaks of slate. The two of them had both decided upon a more mature direction in their physical appearances.  
    "Yes," mused the Master, "when the Time Lords imprisoned you on that dull, pathetic planet, they turned you into a Gallifreyan tree, rooted only to one place and time."  
    Perhaps that metaphor was correct; but if a tree he had been, he was now quite happily uprooted. In his third incarnation, the Doctor had indeed become as tall and slim as a tree, with a lush head of silvery-white hair.  Had he consciously chosen this appearance when the Time Lords had forced his regeneration? The pain of that transformation had been intense: his former incarnation snuffed out to make room for this new body that was so different from the little dark elf he had been. In retaliation to the Time Lords, perhaps he had willed his new self to be stronger, more  elegant, more imposing.  If he were to live his life in exile, he would do so with the utmost dignity: his clothes would be impeccable, even to the point of flamboyance so that he might stand out as much as he could as an alien amongst the humans. They needed to understand that he most definitely was not one of them. He would also learn to master his emotions, and most importantly never fall in love again. And certainly not with a human.  
    Never again, no.  
    The Doctor looked at the meadows, at the silver trees that reminded him so much of Gallifrey. He looked to the base of one of the trees and tried to clear the last remnants of the Time Lord-induced fog from his memory. It was almost as if he could send himself backwards, without the TARDIS, into the past, to see a smaller version of himself in the arms of someone beneath this tree.  
    And he and his former self locked eyes, just for a moment.  
    "You'll be me, won't you?"  
    And the Doctor remembered.  
  
    Abruptly, his concentration was broken by the Master's sharp sigh of impatience. Also broken was the link between himself and his previous incarnation; lost was that vision of he and Jamie in each others' arms. The Doctor felt both his hearts constrict in sudden sorrow.  
    Before him now stood his enemy, his betrayer--who was also his former classmate, his friend, and his lost beloved. Somehow in the vast expanse of time and space they had inexplicably found one another again.  
    The Master rocked on his heels, lifting his eyebrows in feigned surprise. "Did we just have a flashback?"     
    "Why are you here?" asked the Doctor wearily.  
    The small, dapper Time Lord tried to look hurt. He even pouted. "I was concerned for your welfare. Getting your space/time legs back again, rushing off all of a sudden without even letting your human pets know, what was one to think? Perhaps you were fleeing into the universe and leaving us all behind again."  
    "It had crossed my mind to do so, yes," murmured the Doctor.  
    "And yet you made a little pit-stop here on this insignificant pastoral rock."      
    "This was not a 'pit-stop'. This was my destination."  
    "Ah, really? And a place of special memories, as I previously conjectured," said the Master, nodding at his own astute judgment. He folded his arms over his chest, taking in the vista before him. The sound of the nearby surf sighed against the base of the cliffs.  
    "It's really quite a boring place," the little dark man observed.      
    The Doctor looked pointedly at him. "Then go away, by all means. Go somewhere more exciting."  
    The Master shook a reproachful finger at him. "I bring my own excitement to every place I go. You know this."      
    The Doctor rolled his eyes.    
    "Why not go find The Clangers and pester them? As long as you leave me alone and in peace, I don't care if you and a band of puppets go on a merry rampage across the galaxy."  
    The Master looked slightly dismayed. "I didn't  realize they were puppets at first. It was an honest mistake." He shrugged.       
    "You tried to liberate them from a television studio by using an anti-matter grenade."     
    "You can't accuse me of never being altruistic."  
    The Doctor sighed.  
    The Master stepped closer to him, tilting his head in order to study his foe's face. His sleek, pensive eyes regarded him. "I approve of this new form of yours, you know," he finally smiled. "It's quite magnificent, in fact."  
    "How sweet," muttered the Doctor. "Please stop wasting my time and get on with telling me the manner in which you wish to torment me today."  
    The Master pretended to be wounded. He crossed both gloved hands across his breast, one for each heart. "I want to finally talk about something we've been avoiding for far too long. Our past history with one another."  
    "Ancient history. We have no place in each others' lives anymore, no matter how many times you insist on starting wars to get my attention." The Doctor said this with a sneer. He was someone for whom sneering did not come naturally and he thought perhaps he was only mirroring his present company.  
    The Master was quiet then and even averted his eyes. The Doctor found this peculiar and squinted at him with suspicion. His fellow Time Lord and former friend was scrutinizing the meadow in which they were standing: it consisted of tall stalks of lacy blue flowers which brushed against their knees in the breeze from the nearby amaranthine sea.  
    "I remember a field of flowers a bit like this one, except red," the Master then said in a barely audible voice. "No. More crimson."  
    Yes, of course the Doctor remembered the same field. Under a burnt orange sky and surrounded by snow-capped mountains and trees with leaves as argent as his current mane of hair. He and a young man named Koschei has lain under the twin Gallifreyan suns. But he looked carefully at the man who had taken the name Master, and only saw a fragment of his former friend, the dear lad he had once thought he loved more than life itself.  It was there in the dark depths of those hard chestnut eyes which now lifted up to meet his.  
    The Doctor's returning gaze faltered. He tried to turn away but only managed in shifting his shoulders. Something in him wanted to sink deeper into his old friend's eyes and seek his first beloved again. The Master knew what he was searching for and gave him an encouraging nod, continuing to match his scrutiny. His enemy's hypnotism could rivet humans to the spot, but not another Time Lord. Still, he felt as if he had been ensnared all the same and did not yet try to break free.  
    The Master smiled; it was a reasonable smile, almost amused. "Say my name."  
    "I will not deign to call you Master," snorted the Doctor, finally finding release from the dark eyes. He looked away in derision.  
    "Not that name," the Master said. Something in his voice actually sounded desperate this time and the Doctor turned to face him again with a furrowed brow.  
    The Master's eyes had changed, softened, melted. There was an inquiry so deeply embedded in them that the Doctor nearly missed it. There was so much want in those murky liquid depths, or quite possibly hunger.  
    The Doctor now became uneasy. Things were beginning to tilt out of his control, and this always frightened him, made him even more defensive. The Master came closer then, saying a word that was low and musical and like a song, unheard anywhere but Gallifrey centuries ago. The Doctor began to shiver despite himself, his fear escalating and becoming like the panic he had felt when he could not recall how to fly the TARDIS, or Jamie's dear silly smile, or even his own granddaughter's face. Now, an entire ocean of knowledge threatened to hurl down upon him as that word was spoken aloud.  
    A part of him had just been pried open and exposed to danger: the Master had just said his true name, the name that no one else knew but the two of them.  
    "Now say my name," the Master whispered. He was actually pleading. "Please."  
    The Doctor said it.  
  
    He stood frozen to the spot. Due to his complete and utter immobility at that moment, he felt as if he could indeed grow roots and transform into the tree the Master said he was. The Master looked up at the taller man, angling his head to study the suddenly anguished eyes of the enemy. The malice that had only just recently been contained in that mahogany gaze seemed to have dissolved, swept away by a sigh. He lifted a black-gloved hand to gently touch the side of the Doctor's sharply seamed face. He said the Doctor's true name again and the Doctor trembled and closed his eyes.  
    "Don't," he whispered.  
    The other gloved hand joined its mate as he held both sides of his enemy's face, using his fingers to trace elegant strokes up and down the Doctor's cheekbones.  Despite himself, the Doctor gave a shuddering gasp and did not open his eyes. He sighed at the longed-for touch, but yet he fought.  
    "I'm not playing your games," he growled. "You will not manipulate me with our past together."  
    Finally, he snapped a warning glare onto the smaller man.  
    The Master shrugged and his smirk was peculiar, whimsical. He began to unbutton his shirt. "Remember who we are," he said soothingly. He then pulled one of the Doctor's velvet-gloved hands to his now exposed breast. "Our hearts..." The Doctor felt the gentle pounding of the Master's left heart; then the Master guided his hand to the right heart.  
    "We are alike." The Master's voice was soft as velvet as well. "And you don't have to be alone. You know that."      
    The Doctor suddenly had two memories: one of two youngsters lying under a burnt-orange sky and double sunlight, hidden by tall fronds of scarlet ferns. The other was of lying with his head in the lap of a young Scottish lad who stroked his hair and soothed him to sleep.  
    His pulled his hand violently away from the Master's breast with its now thundering heartbeats. "I would rather be alone than be in your company ever again."  
    The Master found this hilarious: he threw back his head in a hardy laugh. "We are runaways, both of us, my dear friend. Neither of us have allegiance to the Time Lords any longer."  
    "Speak for yourself," snapped the Doctor.  
    The Master shook his head in quizzical disbelief. "The Time Lords essentially killed your last self. What loyalty do you owe them?"  
    The Doctor, despite himself, became flustered. "That was just a 'change of appearance'. Part of my sentence for stealing a TARDIS."  
    The Master clucked his tongue in a pitying way. "Alas, Doctor, you may try to reassure yourself of that. But it was an execution. They first stole away your companions and wiped their memories of ever having loved you. That dear lad, yes, the boy with the kilt: he would have no idea that they caused a perfectly healthy Time Lord body to die so they could force it into a  new shape..."  
    "How could you know that? No!" cried the Doctor, feeling the icy ocean of terror and shame rise again within him.  
    "I deduced it easily enough. Don't you realize how long I've been watching you since you left Gallifrey? You get lonely very easily, which is why you took Susan with you at the beginning. Then you just started collecting humans along the way. It was only a matter of time before you became careless. This current one, Miss Jo Grant, are you in love with her yet?"  
     "No! And how dare you! Leave her out of all of this!"  
     The Master continued relentlessly. "You call me cruel, but the Time Lords are the truer monsters. This is why I broke allegiance with them centuries ago. I have no love for them, none. And after what they've done to you, how they've tried to destroy you, you should not either. Why not come with me and escape their reign forever? We can leave this little planetoid and be together as we always were before."  
    The Doctor stared at him, aghast. The thought of escape was overwhelming. The Master once more reached for his hand and gently guided him to the ground until they were both seated in a nest of  cerulean flowers. "Together again," the Master murmured and caressed the obstinate chin of his former beloved. "Why not? We are alike and we are opposites. We belong together. We are logic and intuition."  
    "No..." the Doctor said, but this protest was much weaker. The Master had already reached forward and pressed his lips to the Doctor's too-yielding mouth. The Doctor felt the silky bristles of the other man's beard graze his face and he remembered a boy long ago who had just begun to grow in his first whiskers. The Master pulled back and the Doctor still saw that boy in this swarthy man's shadowy eyes, but only now his full beard was flecked with silver.  
    I have lost, the Doctor thought. He has defeated me.  
    The Master took one of the Doctor's gloves off, slowly and lovingly, finger by finger. He kissed the palm of his naked hand. "You're so lonely, my poor, dear friend. So, so lonely. Let me help you."  
    No, thought the Doctor, don't show weakness. In this incarnation, you are strong, you are dignified, you are clever--  
    "Why, Doctor, you're weeping," the Master said, not unkindly.  
    The Doctor verified this by touching his own face and feeling the cascade of tears that could not be checked. He looked at the silvery drops on the edges of his own fingers, mystified by them. The Master used the backs of his fingers to elegantly brush away the moisture on the Doctor's face. "Your tears betray you, my dear," he murmured.  
    "Don't," the Doctor pleaded again. "Don't do this."  
    The Master looked at him with pity. He then reached forward and folded his enemy into his arms.  
    "Beloved," he said and added the Doctor's secret name. "I've come back for you. And I always will."  
    The slim, willowy form of the Doctor coiled about the Master as the smaller, darker man's hands sank into the froth of silver curls. It was as if the two had never untangled from one another under the orange skies of Gallifrey. Now they were entwined in the blue flowers, beneath a violet sky, and the ocean beneath the nearby jagged cliffs groaned and sighed along with them. For all his superior height, the Doctor appeared the more fragile of the two as he sobbed into the Master's shoulder. And the Master, to his own surprise, began to weep as well.  
    "Come with me," he pleaded. "Come with me. Let us leave together, you and I. We are Time Lords, both. Let us be the last of the Time Lords."  
    "I only miss us being together," wept the Doctor, "I miss our days in the red fields, under the silver trees, the copper sky, the sister suns... No Academy, just us. Just us." He felt as if he might tear himself asunder in his need to tell his old friend all of his sorrows and fears, of all his yearnings and dreams.  
    "Yes," the Master sighed. "But there is so much beyond those beautiful days for the taking. It can be ours, all of it. And they will all bow to us. All of the universe will bow to us, you and I."     
    The Doctor pulled away then. He sat at a slight distance from the languid form of the Master and sighed. It was a gusty, exhausted sigh for the loss of a dream. "No," he said then, wiping away the last of his tears. He was quickly regaining his steely composure. "No. I didn't think you'd ever change. No."  
    He stood up once more to his full towering height, and dressed.  He pulled on his velvet jacket, adjusted his cravat and flicked at the frilly cuffs at his wrists to re-shape them. His voice had become matter-of-fact. "Thank you for providing catharsis. I actually feel refreshed and have gotten my priorities quite on track once more." He pulled on his gloves and smoothed away any imperfections from the impeccable line of his trousers.  
    The Master was still sprawled on the grass, staring aghast at the slim, velvet-clad back. He said the Doctor's name again, but the tall man held up a warning hand, not even deigning to look at him. "Yes, you know what my name used to be. But I am called the Doctor now, and the Doctor I will always be to you. Now... I have another small planet to contend with and protect, for it is my present home. And..." He turned now finally and fixed the Master with a stare of pure ice in his azure eyes. "There are people there that I love. Now, if you'll excuse me."  
    "Doctor--" called the Master, cursing himself for sounding like the weak, fragile half now. He reached out a desperate hand toward his beloved, but the the Doctor barely turned his head.  
    "Go away," cried the Doctor as he strode toward his patient TARDIS, which waited on a nearby knoll. "Never bother me again." He never ceased his pace. And then he vanished within the blue box and it too faded into nothingness.  
  
    The Master wept alone in the meadow of blue flowers.  Finally, he wiped away burning tears. "Oh no," he hissed, "I cannot promise you I will ever go away, my dear Doctor. Not while there's breath in me and both my hearts beat." He then allowed himself to sag into a dejected heap, fumbling for his dusky clothing.  He sighed in resignation.  
    "My beloved Doctor, I am so, so sorry. You have just revealed to me your fatal weakness. It truly is war between us then."  
    He thought: "And you are still a Gallifreyan tree transplanted on the wrong planet, stuck in one place and time. All for the love of your human pets. I pity you, Theta."  
    He dressed and inspected the perfection of his clothing, for he was just as vain as his enemy's current incarnation. He grinned ruefully and told himself it would be the last time he would ever shed tears over the Doctor. He could not promise the same for the Doctor, however. He would make his tears flow again someday, perhaps in some future incarnation of theirs. The idea pleased him and he laughed.     



End file.
